Obama campaign admits lying about Romney’s tax reforms

Even as the panicked Obama campaign launched into a tirade about Mitt Romney’s character to recover ground after Obama’s decisive loss in the first presidential debate, the single most truth-challenged member of the Obama team, Stephanie Cutter, admitted Obama was lying about Romney’s tax reforms during a CNN appearance:

Remember, this is the woman who shamelessly lied about her involvement in the Joe Soptic outrage, falsely claiming she never heard of the man who tried to accuse Mitt Romney of playing a role in his wife’s death. She’s very, very, very flexible when it comes to the truth. And even she had to admit Obama was full of baloney, during one of the few debate moments when his supporters could claim they saw him getting any traction against Romney.

Cutter probably didn’t realize how devastating this admission was, because she’s still peddling the same basic fantasy as the discredited Tax Policy Center study Obama loves to cite: they want to unilaterally declare Romney’s actual plan is “impossible,” then criticize what they imagine he’ll “really” do. This is coming from the same President who promised us his plans would reduce the cost of health insurance, and bring unemployment down to 5.6 percent by now.

A lot of this boils down to the Left’s continued refusal to understand the Laffer Curve, and the concept of dynamic analysis. Tax increases never bring in the promised about of revenue, because they depress economic activity, and people avoid the taxes. Tax rate reductions never produce a dollar-for-dollar equivalent loss of revenue to the Treasury, because they increase economic activity, and reduce the incentives to shift funding into less-productive tax shelters.

There’s nothing complicated about this, and it’s precisely consistent with the real-world history of tax rate adjustments, but the Left’s ignorance remains invincible, because the Laffer Curve is toxic to Big Government politics. Ignoring it is another expression of Milton Friedman’s observation that “underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

Romney’s plan assumes both savings from canceling out tax deductions, and increased revenue from economic growth, to offset the revenue lost to across-the-board tax rate reductions. Under leftist dogma, he’s not allowed to assume that economic growth, because the American people cannot be trusted to productively spend and invest the money Washington doesn’t take from them. Likewise, Obama’s massive tax increases supposedly won’t depress economic growth, because people will happily obey the commands of the State and work just as hard to generate revenue for it, even when they’re not allowed to keep the fruits of their risk and labor. What a poisonous load of bunkum.